Senator Ed Markey (Democrat-Massachusetts) has announced his support for the Iran deal that will let the terrorist regime inspect its own Parchin nuclear weapons research site, conduct uranium enrichment, build advanced centrifuges, buy ballistic missiles, fund terrorism and have a near zero breakout time to a nuclear bomb.

There was no surprise there.

Markey had topped the list of candidates supported by the Iran Lobby. And the Iranian American Political Action Committee (IAPAC) had maxed out its contributions to his campaign.

After more fake suspense, Al Franken, another IAPAC backed politician who also benefited from Iran Lobby money, came out for the nuke sellout.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the Iran Lobby’s third Dem senator, didn’t bother playing coy like her colleagues. She came out for the deal a while back even though she only got half the IAPAC cash that Franken and Markey received.

As did Senator Gillibrand, who had benefited from IAPAC money back when she first ran for senator and whose position on the deal should have come as no surprise.

Last week ended with the cackling hens on CNBC and the spokesmodels on Bloomberg bloviating about the temporary pothole on the road to riches. They assured their few thousand remaining viewers the 11% plunge in the stock market was caused by China and the communist government’s direct intervention in their stock market, arrest of a brokerage CEO, and threat to prosecute sellers surely cured what ails their market. The Fed and their Plunge Protection Team co-conspirators reversed the free fall, manipulating derivatives and creating a short seller covering rally back to previous week levels. The moneyed interests are desperate to retain the appearance of normality and stability, as their debt saturated system teeters on the verge of collapse.

John Hussman’s weekly letter provides sound advice for anyone looking to avoid a 50% loss in the next 18 months. The market has been overvalued for the last three years and now sits at overvaluation levels on par with 1929 and 2000. The difference is that fear has been overtaking greed in the psyches of traders. The average Joe isn’t in the market. Only the Ivy League MBA High frequency trading computer gurus are playing in this rigged market. The 1,100 point crash last Monday is what happens when arrogant young traders, fear and computer algorithms combine in a perfect storm of mindless selling. Suddenly the pompous risk takers became frightened risk-averse lemmings.

QOTD: "The [EPA] recently concluded its authority to regulate “navigable” waters extended to any water source within 4,000 feet of genuinely navigable waters, which meant countless land uses from farming to mining to gas and oil extraction now would require a whole new set of federal permitting.

A federal judge, however, has stepped emphatically in the EPA’s path, declaring its plan to regulate ditches, streams, ponds and other “navigable” waters to be overbroad and an end-run around Congress.

The EPA’s water rule, said Judge Ralph R. Erickson, is “inexplicable, arbitrary and devoid of a reasoned process.”

In a remarkable display of bureaucratic cheek, however, the EPA has responded that it will abide by Judge Erickson’s restraining order only in the 13 states that were named in the lawsuit.

A guiding principle of federal law is that it is meant to cover all Americans, and each of the 50 states, equally. The agency’s decision to go forward with its rule in the balance of the states mocks that principle." --The Republic

Sunday, August 30, 2015

The Federal Reserve opened its annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Thursday. Its experts have assembled to discuss “inflation dynamics.” Concurrently, another group of economists and financial experts is meeting just down the road. They’re discussing monetary policy, as well, but they’re considering questions never raised at Fed symposia—questions like: “Do we really need the Fed?”

It’s a question worth asking. America’s monetary system is the Achilles heel of the world’s economic system.

Something is seriously wrong when trillions of new dollars are created out of thin air to bail out big banks, “stimulate” the economy and buy government debt. And something is dangerously wrong when the political establishment is afraid even to discuss it.

The common assumption—in financial as well as political circles—is that America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve—not only can manipulate monetary policy to keep the economy rolling, but that it must, if we are to avoid economic ruin. But ample evidence suggests that this assumption is dead wrong.

Last year, according to reports on file with the U.S. Department of Labor, the Service Employees Internationals Union paid Scott Courtney $232,060 in total compensation.

However, that is a mere pittance to the estimated nearly $80 million that the SEIU has shelled out in its nearly three-year battle to unionize the nation’s fast-food workers.

Though his official SEIU title is “Deputy Chief of Staff,” according to a post in the Guardian, Courtney is the chief strategist of the SEIU’s Fight for $15 campaign–the campaign concocted by the SEIU in late 2009 as a means of unionizing low-wage fast-food workers.

To date, Courtney and the SEIU have rejected the notion of unionizing 100 or 200 McDonalds and negotiating higher wages to use as a model elsewhere, opting instead for a much grander goal.

Sometimes what’s not said in response to a direct inquiry is more noteworthy than what is said. When the chairman of the Democrat National Committee was asked recently what the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist was, she sidestepped the issue and went a totally divergent direction. It would have provided a valuable service if she’d answered the question directly, for there seems to be no substantive distinction.

“What is the difference between a Democrat and a socialist?” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The DNC chairman started to laugh, so Matthews tried again. “I used to think there was a big difference. What do you think?” Wasserman-Schultz started to sidestep the issue again, so Matthews tried a third time. “Yeah, but what’s the big difference between being a Democrat and being a socialist? You’re the chairwoman of the Democratic Party. Tell me the difference between you and a socialist.” Intentionally avoiding Matthew’s question, she responded, “The difference between—the real question is what’s the difference between being a Democrat and being a Republican.” Her dogmatically superficial and fallacious explication ensued.

A little later, NBC’s Chuck Todd, on “Meet the Press,” asked the same question, which she responded to very similarly, choosing to answer a question not asked. But when the Matthews interview is looked at contextually, she may have already answered the question, when she called Bernie Sanders “a good Democrat.”

That’s a significant statement even at face value, for Bernie Sanders, the junior senator from Vermont, and a Democrat candidate for president, is a self-avowed socialist. He’s officially an Independent, but caucuses with the Democrats and votes with them 98% of the time, according to Socialistworker.org.

Rejected GOP leader Eric Cantor will endorse Jeb Bush and become the co-chair of Bush’s presidential campaign in Virginia, according to Politico.

Cantor was rejected by his Virginia constituents in 2014 for backing a plan developed by Democrats, Republicans, and business leaders that would triple the nation’s huge inflow of migrants.

Bush is promoting a similar migration-boosting policy in his 2016 campaign.

Bush has picked Cantor—who is now working as an investment banker in New York—because of his ability to raise huge funds from business investors, Politico said. Cantor “retains a strong political network in Virginia and has enviable connections among Jewish business leaders who can be key supporters and donors,” says the Politico report.

In turn, Cantor’s support for Bush shows that “he’s making a play for a cabinet position in the next Republican presidential administration,” a source active in the Republican Party of Virginia told Breitbart News.

Last month, Cantor slammed Donald Trump’s popular migration-reform plan, which draws much support from many of Cantor’s former constituents. Trump’s policy is “mean, it’s ugly, it’s divisive, and it is not a sustainable model… ultimately that kind of language, which is off-putting to a large swath of the population, is not something that will elect a president,” Cantor claimed in July.

Cantor held his position as House Majority Leader until he was rejected by his GOP supporters in the June 2014 primary. In the 7th district ballot, Cantor was trounced by a little-known economics professor, Dave Brat, who slammed Cantor’s cooperation with corporatist groups:

QOTD: "A Free Republic reader has made an excellent point: liberals say that deporting 11 million illegal immigrants would be impossibly expensive and impractical, yet they favor confiscating many of the over 300 million guns owned by civilians in the United States." --Mark Finkelstein

[The state's health care commissioner approved a] 36.3% increase sought by the biggest health plan in the state, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. She said the insurer demonstrated the hefty increase for 2016 was needed to cover higher-than-expected claims from sick people who signed up for individual policies in the first two years of the Affordable Care Act.

Several regulators around the country agree with her, and have approved all or most of the big premium increases sought by the largest health plans in their states for the new sign-up season that begins Nov. 1.

...the upsurge is likely to be a big talking point not only during the three-month enrollment season, but through the 2016 campaigns, where GOP opponents of the law are expected to use it as a defining issue against their Democratic rivals.

A rancher is taking the Environmental Protection Agency to federal court, asking a judge to stop the agency from fining him more than $16 million because he built a small pond on his property.

Andy Johnson of Fort Bridger, Wyoming says he made sure to get the proper permits from his state government before building the pond. After all, this is America in the 21st century, and nothing done on your own property — certainly when it involves the use of water — is beyond government concern.

Johnson is facing millions in fines from the federal government after the EPA determined his small pond — technically a “stock pond” to provide better access to water for animals on his ranch — is somehow violating the federal Clean Water Act.

“We went through all the hoops that the state of Wyoming required, and I’m proud of what we built,” Johnson said. “The EPA ignored all that.”

In a compliance order, the EPA told Johnson he had to return his property — under federal oversight — to conditions before the stock pond was built. When he refused to comply, the EPA tagged Johnson with a fines of $37,000 per day.

Dismantling the pond within the 30-day window the EPA originally gave him was “physically impossible,” Johnson said.

That was in 2012. Today, Johnson owes the federal government more than $16 million, and the amount is growing as he tries to fight back.

Hillary's campaign has been described as operating in "bubblewrap", meaning she has been insulated from real citizens and real journalists alike. Except when someone like Ed Henry slips through her rope cordon:

ED HENRY: Secretary Clinton, I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions. One would be—were you aware—were you aware—thank you. Were you aware that your husband wanted to give paid speeches to repressive regimes like North Korea? Do you have any comment on these new emails that raise questions about conflict of interest involving your aide, Huma Abedin? And finally, I wonder — you said there’s nothing unique about this situation. You’ve said this before. Can you name one other Cabinet secretary who had their own server?

CLINTON: Well, let me answer one of your questions because I think that’s what you are entitled to.

As Doug Powers noted the other day as it pertains to Hillary Clinton's public image, "America has spoken."

Rescue workers counted dozens of victims Friday from the increasingly desperate tide of humanity sweeping into Europe fleeing war, oppression and poverty. Austrian police said 71 people likely suffocated in an airless truck and authorities estimated 200 people drowned off the Libyan coast when two overloaded boats bound for Europe capsized...

...The International Office of Migration has recorded 2,432 deaths linked to Mediterranean crossings this year, but countless more have vanished beneath the waves out of sight of rescuers. The official count was set to rise Friday as authorities counted the dead from three shipwrecks off the Libyan coast.

QOTD: "An FBI "A-team" is leading the "extremely serious" investigation into Hillary Clinton's server and the focus includes a provision of the law [the Espionage Act] pertaining to "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information," an intelligence source told Fox News...

...A separate source, who also was not authorized to speak on the record, said the FBI will further determine whether Clinton should have known, based on the quality and detail of the material, that emails passing through her server contained classified information regardless of the markings. The campaign's standard defense and that of Clinton is that she "never sent nor received any email that was marked classified" at the time.

...Current and former intelligence officers say the application of these federal regulations is very straightforward... "Regardless of whether Mrs. Clinton sent or received this information, the obligations under the law are that she had to report any questions concerning this material being classified," said Chris Farrell, a former Army counterintelligence officer who is now an investigator with Judicial Watch. "There is no wiggle room. There is no ability to go around it and say I passively received something -- that's not an excuse." " -- Catherine Herridge, Pamela Browne

Friday, August 28, 2015

Republican legislators have gotten their messaging instructions from their top leaders: Tout unpopular free-trade measures during the August recess, ignore popular curbs on the migration that saps Americans’ wages.

Breitbart News has exclusively obtained an internal August recess messaging instruction set for Republican legislators produced by Sen. John Thune (R-SD), who orchestrates the GOP Senators’ PR pitch. This 20-page messaging instruction manual seems to confirm prior reports by Breitbart News that Republican Congressional leadership has no plans to enact popular immigration reforms to curb large-scale migration.

Each August, Senators and Congressmen return home to listen to constituents’ concerns and to tout the party’s actions in Washington. The recess is set to end Tuesday after Labor Day.

“In this packet you will find a number of resources to help you draw attention to our 2015 accomplishments,” Thune wrote to all 54 GOP Senators. “Please use the August recess to hold events in your state highlighting the work you’ve done and the successes we’ve achieved in the Senate,” he wrote. “Spread the word about [the Senate] getting back to work.”

“Back to work” is apparently the new messaging campaign for the Republican Congress. “Since taking the majority in January, the GOP-led Senate has been delivering real results for the American people, showing that ‘back to work’ is more than a campaign slogan – it’s actually happening,” writes a “Morning Messaging Memo” for Republican congressional staffers obtained by Breitbart News.

My reaction wasn’t included in this poll, because it’s supposed to be a single word and my response was “Oh God why won’t the Clintons just take their ill-gotten millions and go away and leave us alone forever.”

Hillary Clinton has spent a third of her adult life trying to become president. All for nothing.

The first time around, she wasted $200 million just to lose to Obama. $11 million of that money came from the notoriously "flat broke" couple. This time around she was determined to take no chances.

Together with her husband she built up a massive war chest using money from foreign governments and speaking fees from non-profits, funneled into her own dirty non-profit and a complex network of unofficial organizations staffed by Clinton loyalists, secured an unofficial endorsement from Obama and carefully avoided answering questions or taking positions on anything. There was no way she could lose.

Now she’s losing all over again.

Hillary has a ton of money, but can’t buy the nomination. She’s spending a quarter of a million a day on a campaign operation with no actual organized opposition to speak of. Even before Biden officially enters the race, she’s falling behind the joke candidacy of Bernie Sanders in key states.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars without making an impact. She spent almost a million on polling only to see her poll numbers drop every week. She dropped $2 million on ads about her mother to try to make women like her. It didn’t work. Nothing is working anymore.

QOTD: "After sticking out its chest and crowing about a letter from 34 retired generals and admirals supporting the P5+1 agreement, the Obama administration is laughing off a letter opposing the deal by over 200 retired generals and admirals.

As reported by IranTruth on Wednesday, “Leon “Bud” Edney, a retired admiral who served as vice chief of naval operations, organized the letter in the wake of the one produced by other retired officers in support of the Deal. More than 200 senior military officers, many of whom have worked in the White House under both Democratic and Republican leadership, signed the letter to Congress on Tuesday, denouncing the nuclear accord with Iran.” --Jeff Dunetz

Thursday, August 27, 2015

One out of about every twelve newborns in the United States is an anchor baby, or the U.S.-born child of illegal migrants, according to a Pew Research Center study.

This means that one anchor baby is delivered every 93 seconds, based on the 2008 census data analyzed by the Pew.

The huge number of foreign children born on U.S. soil– roughly 340,000 per year— is also an economic imposition on Americans, who pay taxes to help raise, feed, and educate those children of illegal migrants.

Eventually, those 340,000 U.S.-born foreign children can join the U.S. workforce and compete for wages against the roughly four million children of U.S. parents that enter the slow-growing U.S. economy each year.

Only 28 percent of likely U.S. voters believe that children born to illegal migrants in this country should automatically be American citizens, according to a 2011 Rasmussen Reports survey. In fact, the proposal is so unpopular that even Jeb Bush, who favors large-scale immigration, has criticized pregnant foreigners who grab citizenship for their kids by flying into the country posing as tourists. Bush described the practice as “fraud,” and asserted that, “Frankly, it’s more related to Asian people coming into our country — having children in that organized effort, taking advantage of a noble concept, which is birthright citizenship”

The growing industry of “birth tourism” is so large that even California’s government recently cracked down on the illegal — but rarely suppressed— trade.

Speaker of the House John Boehner stunned audience members Wednesday evening at a Colorado fundraiser by referring to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz as a “jackass,” two people in attendance tell The Daily Caller.

At a Steamboat Springs event for GOP Rep. Scott Tipton, the Ohio Republican quipped that he likes how Cruz’s presidential campaign keeps “that jackass” out of Washington, and from telling Boehner how to do his job.

That remark rubbed some attendees the wrong way.

“I don’t think it’s terribly speaker-like, and I think it kind of goes against everything that Reagan ever said about disparaging Republicans,” said Ed MacArthur, the president of Native Excavating, who attended the fundraiser... Another Steamboat Springs resident confirmed Boehner’s remark: “I about fell on the floor... [t]o build coalitions to work together in Washington, D.C., you don’t start it out by calling your colleague a ‘jackass,'” she said.

In Boehner's defense, he was probably liquidly exuberant. You know, juiced. Fleemered. Poleaxed.

But this sort of thing is typical for the cowardly Republican establishment.

In 2013, Mitch McConnell said conservatives "needed a punch in the nose"; the following year, he vowed to "crush" the Tea Party and any Constitutional conservatives who dared to challenge the GOOP establishment.

No: the vitriol is reserved for those who believe in protecting America's interests, limited government and the nation's highest law.

J.D. Winteregg, who mounted a respectable first-time challenge to John Boehner in 2014, has recruited a top-tier campaign staff, including members of Dave Brat's team. You may recall that Brat crushed the second most powerful House Republican, Eric Cantor, in 2014.

U.S. District Court of North Dakota Chief Judge Ralph Erickson placed a temporary injunction against the agency, which would delay the regulation from taking effect Friday.

"The risk of irreparable harm to the states is both imminent and likely," Erickson said in his decision favoring the 13 states that sued the EPA over its Clean Water Rule, formerly the Waters of the U.S. rule. The rule has become a favorite target of Republicans as an example of federal overreach.

The judge said the water rule requires more study, including "jurisdictional studies" of natural gas, oil and water pipeline projects in North Dakota. The state is a leading U.S. producer of oil derived from shale rock formations deep underground... North Dakota [had] led the charge against EPA in the court, arguing that the rule violated state sovereignty.

Get your popcorn ready and set your DVR to record C-SPAN on September 9th and 17th. That's when the applicable House committees will begin grilling EPA officials as to the cause of their catastrophic spill (hint: they purposely ignored safety measures).

Isn't it ironic that the very same would-be dictators -- who can't even operate the massive federal leviathan they already control -- are never satisfied with the amount of power they possess? Whoever said "absolute power corrupts absolutely" was talking about every single hack in the Obama administration, including the Hack-In-Chief.

QOTD: "The issue with Jeb isn’t that he’s the choice of the reviled GOP establishment, but that he doesn’t realize the establishment is reviled. It’s not that Jeb’s political skills are rusty, but that, despite all his missteps, he still doesn’t realize he’s a decade out of step. It’s not that Jeb was blindsided by the Trump phenomenon, but that he is unable to adapt to the unexpected.

Jeb seems like a nice man. He had an excellent tenure as governor many years ago. But it’s obvious that his heart is not in this race, he doesn’t understand our Alinskyite political climate, and he is confused by both his base and modern media. The longer he vies for the nomination, the more he hurts himself and the GOP.

For the good of his country and his party, Bush needs to sit 2016 out." --Jon Gabriel

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

AND THE PROPOSALS JUST KEEP ON COMIN': President Obama announces the details of the Clean Power Plan at the White House, August 4. It’s one of a series of plans the administration has announced this year through the Environmental Protection Agency.

With just 17 months left in his final term, President Obama seems more determined than ever to have the Environmental Protection Agency put in place a slew of the country’s most ambitious environmental standards.

But critics from the business community say the new rules will come at a hefty cost for consumers and argue some of the regulations aren’t even necessary.

EPA insists all the new and proposed rules are needed to protect public health and meet the Obama administration’s goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change.

“What this proposal shows … is just how serious this administration is about putting real concrete measures in place to reduce emissions of harmful CO2 and methane,” Janet McCabe, acting assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, told reporters on a conference call regarding the methane rule.

All told, EPA and the Obama administration have announced proposals for at least five measures in recent months:

QOTD: "John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are no more than stuffed puppets of the White House. With each new fight, they inevitably give reasons why they must agree to Obama’s terms. Often this comes at the expense of not only the nation, but the Constitution as well. This disgraceful pattern will likely repeat itself regarding the Iranian nuclear deal.

As a result of their cowardly silence, the United States has retreated across the globe, empowering our terrorist enemies and enraging our civilized (former) allies. Moreover, the American economy remains cadaver-like, and our borders are open to violent drug cartels who work in tandem with ISIS. (Yes, you read that right.)

Behind the twin political marionettes of Boehner and McConnell are the GOP’s party henchmen – Fox News’ Karl Rove and RNC Chair Reince Priebus. The honest observer readily concludes that Rove and Priebus exist to for only one reason: to attack conservative Republicans and keep them out of power, lest they actually do something good for the country.

To put it bluntly, Rove, Priebus, and the RNC will attack anyone who threatens to get in the way of the Washington D.C.-bound Gravy Train." --The American Report